I

In the beginning, historians of Africa put great store by archeology. Was its great time depth not one of the distinctive features of the history of Africa, a condition that cannot be put aside without seriously distorting the flavor of all its history? Did not the relative scarcity and the foreign authorship of most precolonial written records render archeological sources all the more precious? Did not history and archeology both deal with the reconstruction of human societies in the past? Was the difference between them not merely the result of a division of labor based on sources, so that historical reconstruction follows in time and flows from archeological reconstruction? Such considerations explain why the Journal of African History has regularly published regional archeological surveys in order to keep historians up to date.

Since then some disillusion has set in. First, in spite of all the declarations of principle, most historians are simply not interested in the results of archeology, and for the most part they remain unaware of what is going on in their sister discipline. Perhaps the last discover that truly made an impact on them was the excavation in 1977 of Jenne-Jeno, because the locality became a city well before any Muslim North African influences were felt in West Africa.3 One does not have to look far to find reasons for this lack of interest. Most historians focus on more recent periods than archeologists, on issues other than material culture or technology, and few of them are knowledgeable enough about archeological practice to follow its literature effectively. Most historians feel hopelessly lost when reading debates about the fine print of the seriation of pottery styles or the different interpretations of C14 dates, which so often provide the intellectual excitement at archeological get-togethers. But the foremost problem may well be that historians have too touching a faith in archeology as a "scientific" discipline, and hence misunderstand some basic realities about it. Mesmerized by the observation that archeology deals with concrete objective data, they fail to perceive the role played by interpretation--and hence subjectivity--both in the recovery and in the interpretation of its data. Yet when former aficionados discover that archeologists are after all only human, they like Ranger, tend to be disillusioned and throw out both baby and bathwater.

This seeming incompatibility is of course linked to the difference in the sources used by each discipline. Mute artefacts such as stone tools and pots are the bread and butter of archeologists, while few historians of Africa care about material culture. Most historians deal with written or oral messages. Most archeological findings document situations, while historians often focus on sources which document events. The characteristics of the sources they use obviously exert a strong influence on how scholars imagine their historical reconstructions, and hence on their basic assumptions and theories. Their respective reconstructions are difficult to reconcile because they incorporate differences more fundamental than a difference in subject matter alone.

II

By far the most common theoretical approach in archeology since the late 1950s is the neo-evolutionist theory developed by Julian Steward and Leslie White.6 Its fundamental assumption is that biological evolution, driven by genetic mutation, was succeeded by a multilineal evolution driven by cultural innovation: cultural selection followed natural selection. The mission of archeology is to provide a detailed account of this evolutionary progress for the whole human race. Worldwide comparisons are facilitated by the notion of successive social stages from "band" over "tribe" and "chiefdom" to "state," allied to the notion of universal technological sequences of development from "stone age" to "iron age" and beyond, as rungs on an evolutionary ladder of progress. Archeologists seek to discover "laws" (i.e., recurrent regularities) to explain how a more advanced stage emerges from a preceding one. Thus one seeks to establish the "origins" of chiefdoms, cities, or states by citing conditions recurrent in different parts of the world that are then said to cause the appearance of the next stage. Historical specificity and contingency are erased in this pursuit, although for Steward, at least, cultural evolution is supposed to be multilineal: i.e., different pathways of development can, in different parts of the world, lead from the same simple stage to the next higher stage of evolution. Needless to say, this approach strikes historians as profoundly teleological and hence antihistorical.

Still Phillipson does reject an extension of the evolutionary paradigm beyond material culture. Unlike some others, he avoids treating urbanization and state formation as the next higher stages after "metals." He discusses "political centralization" and urbanization in his last chapter, but refrains from using these concepts as a leitmotif.13 In an evolutionary scheme the superiority of certain technologies over others is functional: they are better adapted than others to the particular natural and human environment. Phillipson argues in the case of Egypt, for instance, that the natural environment and its changes explain where, why, and when a complex society arose and why it exhibited its typical technological features.

The spread of technological innovation used to be attributed primarily to population migration rather than borrowing, perhaps by analogy to the "survival of the fittest." Migration appears in the archeological record as a clear break between two successive occupations of a site, accompanied by major differences in the shape and assemblage of objects found on different occupation levels. Yet what exactly constitutes a major change that could not be explained by a series of gradual internal changes, and hence must be attributed to migration, remains a matter of interpretation.

Innovation, of course, can also spread by borrowing from neighbors, a process for which there is no direct parallel in natural evolution: genes or organs are not borrowed. Perhaps for this reason it was unfashionable until recently to invoke this process, except as an interpretation of last resort. That situation is now reversed. Borrowing is now interpreted not as a passive undergoing, but as a variant of active internal innovation, which is triggered off by a functional need to adapt better to changing human or natural environments. Hence arguments for borrowing are accompanied by suppositions concerning the functional usefulness of the feature borrowed, despite the fact that, while this approach may well apply to some items, it is patently untenable as a general rule. What, after all, is the functional usefulness of a borrowed musical instrument or melody?

Most archeologists may well feel comfortable with the neo-evolutionary approach because it allows them to construct a single narrative encompassing the whole world and encompassing what used to be called "the ascent of man," and hence to reinforce their place in the wider discipline of anthropology. Yet another reason is certainly as important--in this scheme of things gaps or lacunae in the record are only a minor hindrance. One looks for epochal innovations and orders them in sequence of complexity. That yields the ladder of ineluctable and irreversible progress. Later finds will either add information about the spread of diagnostic evolutionary items or can even lead to the discovery of hitherto unsuspected intermediary rungs on the evolutionary ladder.

Secondly, Devisse recognizes that the concrete material character of artefacts has a special value. Archeological objects are concrete bits directly out of the past--not reconstructed--even if they also remain mute.
The features of such objects cannot be generalized away, and each object can become the subject of a wide variety of technical investigations. Archaeopteryx helps to unlock knowledge about the past hidden in the structure and makeup of objects.

It is instructive to contrast the plots of Phillipson's or Shawls books with that of the catalog (a huge book) of Devisse. The division by stages, a chronological progression, and an overreaching narrative are all absent in the catalog. Devisse sets the stage by plotting the "human geographies" of successive ages. Lucien Fèbvre could not have done better. He then illustrates the present state of research by discussing methodologies, presenting case studies, and underlining specific achievements, failures, and problems before tying archeology and history together by a presentation of studies about objects from a past also documented by written records.

III

It is just as important for a reader of archeological accounts to be somewhat familiar with the practices of the discipline as it is to know something about its epistemology. While it is correct to think of archeologists as people who find and excavate sites, it is quite misleading to imagine that this is all they do. The process of research begins with funding requests, which are justified either by the claim that the area to be studied is "virgin territory" or, more commonly, that further work at an already-known site or at new sites in a known area will throw further light on a well-known general problem. Archeological research is much more expensive than historical research and therefore the level of approved funding also shapes the outcome much more--for instance, by limiting the time available for surveys or digging, the size of an individual dig, the number of experts who can be taken into the field, the diversity and the number of laboratory analyses that can later be undertaken, and the planning for excavations extending for several years in the future.

Once funding has been secured, survey or excavation can take place. Any place where human artefacts are visible is a potential site (except for the occurrence of a single isolated object), while a confirmed site is one where excavation has taken place. Sites are not necessarily permanent settlements and historians should beware of treating them as such. Nor are maps indicating sites directly comparable to historical maps. Many a historian has been puzzled by the fact that once familiar places on an older archeological map are no longer listed on a later map, where other places now appear. Each map simply reflects the state of play at the time the map is made: hence the saying that sites do not exist because they are an artefact of archeological research.

Typically, archeologists, having heard about traces of old human activity in an area tour several potential sites, then look at the visible remains or conduct auger tests and choose a site for digging. This choice is often quite subjective, and all sorts of variables play a role. A Late Stone Age specialist chooses sites where typical stone tools abound, a ceramic fiend one where the diversity of shards is thickest on the ground. One person will be attracted by the potential to recover trade goods, another by organic remains (often in very wet or very dry conditions), others by traces of slag or trash heaps or living floors or bones, all depending on their evaluation of the potential of the site to contribute to the solution of one or another outstanding question in the professional literature. Digging techniques can also differ very much according to the type of site: living sites on open terrain,43cemeteries,44caves,45 hoards or single structures,46 industrial sites,47 mounds or tells,48 urban sites,49 even underwater sites. All sorts of other variables such as soil conditions and climatic conditions, which can be crucial for the preservation of remains, as well as the topography of the site itself, must be taken into account. Readers of site reports must be aware of such conditions in order to assess what was recoverable at the place excavated and how orderly the recovery could be.

Surveys are now common in many parts of tropical Africa, although altogether they cover only a small fraction of that huge territory. Surveys are crucial because they help to indicate how representative of the whole an excavated site actually is. In addition they uncover correlations between site distribution and natural features such as soils (fertile or not), topography (e.g., hill refuge areas), ecotones (transhumance), and bodies of water, thereby yielding clues as to the predilections and occupations of the populations involved. Thus in southern Uganda sites with Urewe ceramics occur only on fertile soils, suggesting that the people who used those ceramics were farmers.55 Sometimes they also show hierarchies of sites which can then be confirmed and extended by further excavation. These techniques have now proven to be very successful all over southern Africa.

Any reader of archeological literature must be keenly aware of continuing technical innovations in the field. The archeologist is like the conductor of an orchestra composed of geologists, chemists, soil specialists, paleobotanists and zoologists, human biologists, specialists in ceramics, metallurgists, specialists in textiles, and as many more as the score being played requires. He or she turns over much of what is found at a site to such specialists for archeometry. What laboratory work actually is done and how well it is done depends first on the availability of funding to finance all the work. But it also depends on the imagination and the predilections of the digger. It is the archeologist who calls in other specialists for consultation, and it is the archeologist who must know beforehand what others can do with a bit of bone, a hank of hair, or a handful of dust. In practice that knowledge is informed both by what has been done hitherto and by the particular interest of the archeologist in question. Thus someone interested in intercontinental trade will be well aware of what can be done with bits of glass, while someone interested in diets will know which specialists can deduce what from bone and how they do it. Thus a good deal of subjectivity is involved in the choices made of what to send for analysis and for which kind of analysis. Anyone assessing site reports should be aware at least of which analyses seemed obviously to be called for and which ones were actually carried out.

Site reports then are not easy to assess. The choice of the site dug, the excavation technique used, the placement of the pits or trenches, the choice of laboratory analyses carried out or omitted, the association of features, the stratigraphy, the extrapolations and inferences made are all sensitive to potentially systematic bias, while the proposed interpretation may or may not be as plausible as alternative interpretations. It takes considerable familiarity with the relevant literature truly to understand such reports and to be aware of possible alternative interpretations. A site report then--always and unavoidably--includes a subjective component. It is no more fully objective than a historical monograph is.

Similarly, the presence of a settlement plan in which similar circular houses surround a central circular kraal (the so-called SBCP pattern) from the late first millennium A.D. onwards recalls the plans of recent Nguni and Sotho settlements and has led to attributing basic features of Sotho and Nguni social organization linked with such plans to these early populations. This may well be so, but the proof so far is less substantial than in the previous case.70

Attempts to infer social organization from archeological features have unfortunately not been limited to plausible links relating to the distributions and plans of settlements. A recent fashion without, I believe, any plausibility whatsoever--involves the deduction of social organization and associated cultural features from ceramic style. The premises are: (i) a ceramic style is representative of the whole stylistic corpus in a given culture; (ii) graphic style, a mainly conscious but arbitrary system of signs, is closely correlated with language, another arbitrary but unconscious system of signs; (iii) language shapes world views; iv) worldview includes a precise type of social structure. Hence ceramic decor allows one to differentiate between languages, ethnicities, social structures, and ideologies. Once the language involved with a particular style has been identified, all the rest follows.

Language can be linked to sites from long ago by plotting the present distribution of languages and language families on a map of sites. From language, ethnoarchaeology. then leads to specific social and cultural features: X is matrilineal, with an initiation for girls, bridewealth service, an organization in chiefdoms with titled officials, and a belief in both ancestors and nature spirits... whereas Y is patrilineal, with a boys' initiation, bridewealth in livestock, a segmentary lineage system and an ancestor cult, capped by a High God. Apart from the first premise, which is often correct, none of the others holds at all. Even the cherished link between language and worldview (the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis) has been totally discredited. If this hypothesis were correct, how then could we expound a complex worldview in any language in which we choose to do so? The lesson is that one cannot milk ceramic evidence for more than it is worth.

Potential bias is not only as common in archeology as in history, but just as diverse as well. Theoretical bias has been highlighted in this paper only because historians may not be aware of it. Among others, the effects of the many familiar -isms, such as colonialism, nationalism, and Marxism are easily detected.72 And so are various familiar idiosyncratic preferences with which historians are familiar from their own experience. There is therefore no need to expatiate. But it is useful to draw attention to a disguised expression of bias which appears as a dispute over C14 dates. At first it looks as if frequent disagreements over dates flows naturally from the uncertainties of the method: the source of the carbon, its association with artefacts, the statistical frequency of false results, the number of samples required, the bracket of time (the "resolution") involved in the date and the accuracy of the corrections required to convert a radiocarbon date to a calendar date. On the surface the arguments for acceptance or rejection of a date are always highly technical.

But it soon becomes evident that larger issues often lurk behind such debates, because disagreements among scholars do not occur at random. The acceptance or rejection of dates is conditioned by prior expectations as to what is acceptable or not. For instance, French scholars systematically accept earlier dates for iron-smelting both in West Africa and in the Great Lakes area than their English-speaking colleagues do, irrespective of the nationality of the archeologist who obtained such dates. Indeed, some English-speakers have discarded early dates which they acquired themselves, claiming that the material must have been intrusive or that there was a laboratory error. Perhaps the French have been more influenced by African nationalism and the English-speakers more by neo-evolutionary theory? Be that as it may, bias is certain. It cannot be an accident that almost every early date proposed by one group is dismissed by the other. One who follows the debate closely discovers that the reason for accepting or rejecting proposed dating usually is that they fit or do not fit with the chronological bracket that seems "reasonable," given a belief that there was--or was not--diffusion involved.73 Precisely because debates about chronology are both reasonable and frequent, they should attract attention as a litmus test for bias.

The relentless exposé of the subjectivities involved in archeological theory and practice is not intended as a dismissal of the discipline, any more than a similar exposé about subjectivity in historical research would be. The task is necessary in order to understand the contributions archeology can make to African history. If Africa archeology can and has documented such subjects as long term climatic change, including short term oscillations, whether anthropic or edaphic in origin; population (growth, spatial distribution, stability, and the layout of settlements) and by inference about the economy, the spatial scale, and the degree of stratification of society; technology, including food production and by inference labor processes and the daily rhythms of life; diet and health (from the analysis of human remains and kitchen rubbish); material standards of living as well as the movement of goods and, by inference, the social and economic uses of goods, trade, and contacts between communities; ritual practices, usually funerary, but sometimes dealing with ritual localities or objects and, by inference, some elements of ritual, ideology, and the social uses of wealth; art history, including style and iconographic material rendering attitudes, costume, or various objects and, by inference, conclusions about a wide variety of human activities and aspirations.

This whole range of data is almost never available on a single site or small set of sites, however. In addition, archeology does not directly contribute data about the non-material aspects of human thought and activity such as ideology, ritual gesture, or the practices of social organization. Even many economic features such as manual labor motor habits are not documented. True, further inferences can be made about some of these features, but unsubstantiated inferences alone are conjecture, not evidence. Because artefacts are mute objects, not messages, they do not allow for a reconstruction of history in the same way as written documents or oral data can--a history without named agents, much less detailed than messages, yet also more direct and more concrete. Therefore historians should not expect a reconstruction similar to the one that messages allow for. Yet for all that, they should not underestimate the contributions of archeology either, as they have also done.

IV

Specific archeological findings expand existing historical reconstructions; they require a re-evaluation of such reconstructions or they allow reconstructions to be made for periods for which there was hitherto insufficient evidence. Using mainly data which have accumulated over the last decade or so, we examine such contributions first for inland West Africa during the long first millennium A.D. (from ca. A.D. 1-ca. 1250), and then for eastern and southern Africa for the half-millennium from ca. 750 to ca. 1250 A.D.

A second recent major finding concerning the period before 750/800 A.D. has been that developments in the Middle Senegal Valley and the Inner Niger Delta were radically different. In the former little change occurred either in the size or in the distribution of settlements, although some population growth did occur, at least until around 900 A.D. Then in less than a single century, the valley was suddenly unified into the kingdom of Takrur and just as suddenly dragged into the wider world. Imported copper, textile technology, glass, and other exotic imports appear and by 1000 A.D. at least some inhabitants were Muslims. Meanwhile the population of the IND grew more substantially as the millennium wore on, and settlements began to cluster around larger centers such as Jenne-Jeno or Dia, which became substantial towns. By 1000 A.D. the IND harbored an estimated tenfold its present population. Concomitantly, trading networks expanded and fused the whole IND into a single network running from the goldfields on the Upper Niger to the region of the later Timbuktu. Yet by 700 A.D. and later, the kingdom of Ghana developed not in the populous IND, but in a nearly empty area to its northwest.84

A dramatic reversal becomes very visible during the thirteenth century, when settlements west of the delta and northwards in the heart of Ghana were suddenly abandoned because, it is claimed, of increasing aridity. A precipitous decline in the size of the Tellem population during the same century is hardly coincidental. Here aridity alone cannot be blamed. Nor can it be blamed for the concomitant decline in population, leading even to the desertion of urban sites, in the IND.86 Such a thorough redeployment of population over such a large region suggests effects induced not just by climatic change but by political upheaval as well. After all this was the century of Ghana's decline and the rise of Mali.

If the IND was part of the kingdom, why was its capital so eccentric and had been since before the upswing of the trans-Saharan trade? Why was not Dia or Jenne-Jeno the capital? If the delta was not part of Ghana, what was its political organization? In any case, it has now become impossible to believe the Arab authors who describe the kingdom as the dominant power in the whole of the western Sudan: the contrary archeological evidence is simply too overwhelming. The new evidence from the Senegal and Bura areas is also beginning to raise major questions as to the relative place of Ghana in the western Sudan, as well as to the history of population, economic, and sociopolitical dynamics elsewhere.

Archeological evidence now gives us a rather full picture of the standard of living in the marginal Bandiagara area, far away in the bush. Finds in the dry caves near Sanga, which date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, include woodwork (among them two figurative sculptures), basketry, leatherwork, and metalwork, as well as an abundance of ceramics and textiles. This was a poor farming community, located on the far edge of the delta in a marginal environment for farming, the sort of place where iron tools other than arrowpoints were recovered rather than buried with the dead, where women wore basic pubic coverings in grass and men had neither trousers nor boots.91 Yet at the same time there were well-woven tailored shirts, wrappers, blankets, bonnets, and good sandals. Some inhabitants at least could afford textiles imported from both North Africa and Nubia. Perhaps not surprisingly, leather objects were abundant, but so were iron objects. Quartz jewels jostled carnelian beads, perhaps from the Tilemsi valley, glass beads from northern Africa, and the occasional expensive bronze pendant.

The Tellem of Sanga lived in a backwater, but they were not isolated from the delta. They could afford imports from far away, no doubt via a distribution point on the long-distance routes, probably in the delta. But what did they sell in exchange for these goods? So far we have no clue. Did they use any currency, perhaps similar to the small lengths of copper wire used at Kumbi Saleh? None has been found.

Moreover, the excellent state of preservation of most Tellem objects adds much evidence about technology and expertise, and thus indirectly draws our attention to the presence of industrial development, especially with regard to ceramics, textiles, and metals. The output of these industries all over the IND and its surroundings must have been considerable, absorbed much time and labor, involved economic specialization (certainly for metals, perhaps for textiles, leatherwork, and woodcarving), perhaps with the formation of castes, and obviously led to a flourishing trade in the finished products.

Hitherto, however, not much attention has been paid to the organization, size, localization, and political control, or to the economics of industrial labor and production, apart from a recent suggestion that a caste system may already have existed.93 Yet industrial products were as essential to the inhabitants of the western Sudan, and especially those of the delta, as the production of food by foraging, fishing, and farming. Until now historians have focused almost exclusively on polities, Islam, or the trans-Saharan trade, and their descriptions retain a faint whiff of the fairy tale as a result. Grounding a political history on a basis of population dynamics and of the daily concerns of most inhabitants will teach us more about political possibilities, rooting the long-distance trade in the local trade in industrial products and foodstuffs which sustained it. It will help to think of Islam in terms of the ideologies, concerns, and rituals of daily life and thus will transform ethereal accounts of the past into a dense and multifaceted history.

Meanwhile, it has been evident for decades that between ca. 750 and ca. 1100 A.D. major changes occurred in eastern, east-central, and southern Africa, a phenomenon that has been given the unfortunate label of the Later Iron Age, a term which Phillipson wisely avoids in his textbook. What occurred during those centuries was the growth of regional systems which are the direct antecedents of the main subactual regional varieties of cultures and societies. Wherever systematic surveys have been made, they reveal that the number of sites dating to the Later Iron Age is so much greater than those for the preceding period that the increase cannot be attributed just to the fact that more recent sites are better preserved than older ones.

In eastern central Africa the most informative group of sites remain the cemeteries of the Lualaba depression with their rich and varied deposits. The people who lived there before ca. 1300 A.D. were the forerunners of the later central Luba kingdom. No research could be undertaken there recently, but one wishes at least for more laboratory studies on objects already recovered. In the Copperbelt it has also long been known that standardized copper ingots were being produced by ca. 900 A.D., and that some of these were exported. By 1300 A.D. copper was clearly no longer exchanged only for use but also as a standard of value and payment in all sorts of transactions, so that a genuine currency, the copper cross, had developed.113 Regardless of whether or not most of this money was used in trade, it testifies to the existence of a very complex economic and sociopolitical system in which transactions were so numerous, for so many purposes, and between so many different people that a single fungible standard item of exchange was needed.

Further research in Zambia and Malawi continues to focus on identifying and classifying ceramic styles. The main result from a number of recent site reports seems to be that there is a period from ca. 750 to 1000 A.D., in which the number of ceramic styles increased greatly. This attests to a strong growth in local innovations as compared to the earlier situation. At the same time, contact between farmers and foragers seems to have increased during this period. A dramatic reversal of tendencies occurs ca. 1000 A.D., when the preponderance of centrifugal tendencies was suddenly reversed. A single one of the many earlier local styles was now rapidly adopted over most of Zambia and Malawi. While one feels that this sudden change somehow documents a major historical upheaval, it still remains quite unclear what exactly such a shift of ceramic style means in terms of economic, social, or political history.

If the findings from archeological research in eastern and southern Africa dealing with periods before 750 A.D. are still too rudimentary to be of much use to historians, findings for later periods have become the linchpin for any general reconstruction of southern African history after that date. In contrast, the findings for later periods in east-central and eastern Africa are still not rich enough to allow for any overall reconstruction, with the signal exceptions of western Uganda, the coastal cities, or the sites in the Lualaba depression. Yet little by little elements relating to the daily rhythms of life and standards of living are emerging, even for those periods and areas where the overall record is still too rudimentary to be connected into a single coherent picture.

VI

When a total consensus about some point exists in an allied discipline, historians naturally tend to accept it without question. And yet the consensus may turn out to be wrong. Perhaps the premier case of this in African history is the issue of "the Neolithic revolution." Until recently the deeply-held consensus among archeologists about this question was that there had been such a revolution in Africa. Historians naturally accepted this and drew consequences from that supposed fact. The thesis originates with the archeology of Europe and the Middle East.119 It holds that the transition from a foraging to a farming and herding way of life had been very rapid (hence revolutionary) and constitutes a watershed (hence a revolution) in human history, comparable only to that following transition--"the birth of civilization"--and of course it is an evolutionary vision!

Farming created sedentism and hence was a prerequisite for any society more elaborate than a transient local community. Archeologists of Africa, along with all others, accepted this notion and historians imbibed it from them. Given the suddenness and the importance of this revolution, it was only reasonable for historians to think that the foundations of modern African societies and cultures were laid during or after this revolution. Meaningful African history began with the acquisition of farming.120 The archeological consensus was that agriculture and herding had been introduced from the Middle East to northern Africa and resulted in the establishment of sedentary communities there. Then, after a delay to domesticate local foodcrops, the complex gradually spread over the continent. The knowledge of metallurgy later spread in a similar way from the Middle East to northern Africa and then further south. But today that consensus among archeologists has been shattered.

For all we know, the appearance of pottery in these two locations may have been due to independent invention. Pots testify to at least some sedentism. Ceramics make cooking possible, allow one to use a much wider range of vegetable foods than was previously possible, provide improved dietary hygiene, and thus indirectly affect both health and population. Next, by ca. 6000 B.C. one finds semi-domesticated millets and sorghums at Nabta Playa.125 Intensive foragers were now turning into farmers, at a time when communities in lower Egypt may or may not have been cultivating barley, perhaps of Egyptian origin, as well as wheat and emmer, probably of Asian origin.

Similar situations seem to have been quite common in other parts of tropical Africa as well. Hence it no longer makes any sense to believe that a huge social and cultural divide yawns between foragers and farmers, nor to hold that African history really begins only after the introduction of full-fledged farming; some of the roots of modern African societies and cultures may go back much further into the past than that and with them a meaningful history of Africa also stretches back much further than was previously thought. Rather than stress discontinuities between foraging communities and their successors, historians should now look more closely at the continuities between them.

The story of the demise of the Neolithic revolution teaches us that complex innovations never are single events, but processes. No single invention, technological or otherwise, was so momentous that it immediately and radically transformed daily routines. To the people involved, that would have been far too risky, nor would a change of this magnitude have been comprehensible. Major innovations occur incrementally over much time. It follows that what happened between the introduction of a particular innovation and the time when farming had become absolutely predominant is going to be more important than the event of a first small innovation itself.

The initial step or steps had to be followed by a series of experiments during a formative period that must be reckoned in many centuries, before a mature system could be fully in place. Where such intermediate steps did not occur, farming might not develop at all. Even when a mature phase was in place and farm products had become the mainstay of the diet, the history of farming does not end. New crops, animals, field techniques, and labor arrangements were--and continue even now to be--incorporated into the local system. Farming strategies also changed and still continue to change--e.g., when people switch over to another staple crop, such as a shift from a sorghum to a millet, or from cereals to maize, or from yams to manioc. There is no end to the possible changes. And what is true for the farming process also holds for any other major technological innovations, such as metallurgy or textiles, or indeed for complex social innovations such as "urbanization." That major innovations are not events, but processes, is a point which until very recently has been overlooked until the demise of the Neolithic revolution focused the attention of scholars on the issue.

The demise of the Neolithic revolution also spells the end of the simple diffusionist model. In this view major innovations gradually and inexorably spread from a cradle of origin to the furthest reaches of a continent or beyond. That model is now shown to be false. Chronological anomalies in documented distributions have falsified it beyond redemption. The record is better explained by assuming that in similar circumstances parallel innovations were invented several times and in several different places. While some limited geographical diffusion may well have occurred from any or all of these places, such a diffusion was far from being always present, regular, and automatic. Instead, diffusion was an unpredictable and capricious process, contingent on the specific conditions obtaining in various localities at the time in question, just as any other historical development is.

Moreover, because each innovative event is only one step in a complex process, the next step may well occur in a place other than where the first one occurred, and might even have been invented several times independently in several localities. This new step could also--but need not--diffuse outward from its cradle. For each of the later steps the situation described for the second step would also obtain. To put it in a nutshell: the invention and spreading of innovations is a historical process, subject to all the contingencies and vagaries of any historical process.

The demise of the "Neolithic revolution" and of the diffusionist model which accompanied it is not the only case where a consensus among archeologists might have led historians astray. For example, all archeologists start human history with an account of the emergence of hominids, now traced back to well over four million years ago, and historians have accepted this position without serious demur.141 Yet Homo sapiens sapiens, people like us, appear only about 150,000 years ago. Any earlier species is simply not human, but only hominid. The possibility of writing history requires that there be a sufficient common identity between the historian and the actors of the past for the historian to be able to understand the motivation of such actors in rational or emotional terms. That condition does not obtain with regard to hominids because they are not of our species. Their study should be the object of primatology and not history. The condition of sufficient common identity obtains only when true humans appear.142 These early people were just as intelligent, blessed with the same linguistic capacities, and endowed with same emotional makeup as people living now.

VII

In order to make good use of archeological evidence for historical reconstruction, scholars must first fully realize what its handicaps and strengths are. A nearly total adherence to neo-evolutionary theory (including various environmental determinisms), the refusal to recognize fully the role of contingency by sticking to the use of theoretical models, the extravagant use of extrapolation, and the lack of contemporary testimony to limit the free range of the imagination are the main handicaps of archeology. Its main advantages are that the evidence unearthed is concrete, usually documents situations, and often sheds light on the lives of ordinary people.

The main handicap of documentary (written or oral) evidence as used by historians, on the other hand, is that the bulk of that evidence consists of testimony nearly always deriving from leaders, and testimony which often consists of a narrative of successive events which happened to leaders of communities, thus leading historians both to focus their accounts on the exceptional doings of leaders and to do so from the point of view of these leaders. Its advantages are the limitations put on the imagination of the historian by the interpretation already provided in the testimony, the amount of detail often recovered, and the identification of historical actors, with their possible motivations. A fruitful integration of archeological data in a general historical reconstruction should first recognize the limits of its potential and then exploit its complementary strength to documentary history.

The main reason that Roberts was unable to achieve a fully satisfying historical reconstruction in his History of Zambia before a period for which documentary evidence becomes available was simple. The mass of evidence available was too small, and especially not diverse enough, to allow for anything more than the most rudimentary sketch of the past. And for Zambia this is still true today. Historians should accept that in the present state of research one can begin to elaborate a meaningful (because complex enough) historical reconstruction for the western Sudan by the middle of the first millennium A.D. and for portions of eastern and southern Africa after ca. 750 A.D. Before those dates the lacunae in what we need to know, even for a still rudimentary reconstruction, are too overwhelming.

Having stated this, one must also underscore that this situation constitutes substantial progress over what could be done just twenty years ago. Even though the accumulation of evidence in archaeology is by nature-- as well as by the realities of funding--quite slow and irregular, it nevertheless occurs, a fact which historians tend to overlook. They should not assume that because such data are not in hand now and progress is so slow that archeology will never yield sufficient data to allow for a historical reconstruction of earlier periods. Nor should other impatient historians attempt imaginative reconstructions on the basis of a site or two. Historians must appreciate that a new find can at at any moment completely overturn the conclusions drawn from such meager evidence. Therefore meaningful reconstructions can only be undertaken when enough sites have been excavated and when the diversity of artefacts and features recovered is sufficient to make such a surprise very unlikely. The second condition is as important as the first. In the case of Zambia, for instance, there are plenty of excavated sites, but the diversity of artefacts and features recovered is still too narrow to allow for a satisfactory reconstruction.

As to complementary strength, an excellent illustration of this is the case of Daboya, a late urban site in Ghana. Daboya was already an old and
sizeable settlement when it became part of the Gonja kingdom before 1600. In the later eighteenth century Gonja itself was overrun by Asante, to which it became tributary. Much of the known information about the kingdom stems from the Kitab Ghunja, compiled ca. 1751. Yet excavations at Gonja showed that both the Gonja and the Asante conquests remain invisible on the site.144 One might conclude from this that the "resolution" of archeological data is not good enough to capture even momentous political events. Be that as it may, what one should conclude is that even these momentous political events left little mark on the daily lives and living standards of the inhabitants of Daboya. In other words, the successive political upheavals were of little moment to the whole of the population. Hitherto historians had not appreciated how much the Kitab Ghunja had misrepresented the past by elevating the experience of a small political and religious minority to the level of a universal upheaval. The archeological record in this case documents the fate of ordinary people and thereby substantially alters the accepted reconstruction.

In general, archeology helps us give resonance to documentary evidence by placing it against its background, by eliciting the longue durée in which documented events and trends unfold. All too often we tend to take this background as a given, as if it were an unchanging backdrop to the action described in the foreground. And yet it is not. Natural surroundings, population movements, ways of making a living, the daily round of activities, and personal relationships all change. It will, for instance, no longer suffice merely to note that the inhabitants of the Middle Niger Valley grew grain crops during the first millennium A.D. and assume that it was then just as it is now.

There are those who do speculate that a grain surplus was produced in or south of the delta for export to the inhabitants of the desert edge. Yet during this whole period the inhabitants of Jenne-Jeno, as well as some others in the delta, relied as much on gathered food, especially wild rice, as on cultivated cereals.146 What food then, if any was exported? Was there a substitution of wild rice and grass seeds for imported cultivated cereals further south so as to forward the latter to the desert edge? Or was it wild rice and grass seeds that were exported? One also assumes that both climate and population were stable, but they were not. The delta expanded or contracted and so did its population. Any historical reconstruction worth its salt will then be a description of the conjunction at a shorter or longer moment in time of all the various temporal movements from the majestic sweep of deep change to the oscillations of the time of events.

While reliable iconographic records for tropical Africa before ca. 1880 are rare, there are more of them than most scholars realize, and the same holds true for objects which have survived in museums. It is a pity that historians have not shown much interest as yet in systematic studies of material culture, which would be both priceless to archeologists and of considerable relevance to historical reconstructions in general. Having these sorts of data will certainly lessen, but not completely eliminate, the risk of anachronism in ethnoarchaeology. This can often be done, however, by applying the linguistic technique called "words and things" to the vocabulary linked to the items studied, since that technique allows one to establish the relative age of each of the words used, and thus indicates how great the continuity, if any, has been between the archeological situation and the present-day one with which it is compared.149

VIII

In a sense this paper has been but a gloss on the two quotations with which it opened. Yes archeology is indispensable for any worthwhile history of Africa and historians should be wary of conclusions drawn by archaeologists. Yet the paper also shows that these quotations are far too vague and too restricted to be useful. The task of the historian is to reconstruct history, and anyone of whatever discipline who does this is by definition a historian. This task requires two conditions: that there be enough evidence for a coherent reconstruction, and that the general rules of evidence be applied to that record.

Much of this paper has been devoted to the second condition. About the first condition it was said only that there must be a sufficient mass of diverse data. Some reconstructions are obviously much richer than others, yet there still exists a minimal threshold. In order to achieve a coherent reconstruction there should be a body of interconnected data ranging from background features affecting the whole population, such as climate, demography, material culture, the various technologies in use, daily routines, major social identities and cleavages, etc. to information allowing one to reconstruct at least a generally coherent narrative about the specific changes which a given society experienced during the period studied. For most periods in African history this requirement implies the use of a wide variety and types of sources, not just archeological data laid side by side with documentary testimony. In this sense, comparing just archeological and documentary sources is a mistake.

A general discussion of what is required to achieve a full reconstruction of history would take us too far. But we must at least conclude with the remark that when archeologists offer specific reconstructions of history, as they often do in their site reports, they are historians. More than most historians who use written or oral sources, they solicit and coordinate evidence from other disciplines relating to the sites they study, usually from the physical or natural sciences, but sometimes from other sources as well. They participate in the common task of reconstructing a vision of the past derived from a wide array of sources by a common method. All historians, whatever their disciplinary affiliation, can therefore learn a great deal from the practice of archeologists about the perils and the successes of reconstructing history from a varied lot of sources. Hence the contribution of archeology to the history of Africa is not limited to the discovery of new and complementary sources to be used by others, but goes to the very heart of the historical enterprise.

11. Note the subtitle Food, Metals, and Towns of T. Shaw et al. eds., Archaeology, for the later part of the sequence, which also reflects the sequence of topics discussed in the work. Return to the Text.